


old familiar places

by astrolesbian



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5+1 Things, Character Study, Gen, kind of? it's more of a backstory study but yaknow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-19 08:31:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12406836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolesbian/pseuds/astrolesbian
Summary: five birthdays hunk had at home, and one he had in space (not necessarily in that order)





	old familiar places

**Author's Note:**

> [leans very close to the mic] i love hunk garrett and want him to be happy and appreciated. thanks for coming to my ted talk
> 
> oh and the title's from a frank sinatra song that plays at my job sometimes. dont ask me what song i dont know

****_1._

The first birthday Hunk can remember celebrating is when he was six.

He’s sure he celebrated it before then, like, he must have _had_ birthdays. Even if he would shuffle through different foster homes with different amounts of surrogate siblings and surrogate parents, he knows they were all kind enough people to remember to buy him a cupcake and kiss his forehead. He was lucky like that. The people who fostered him might have been busy, but they were always nice to the kids.

But he doesn’t remember those birthdays, ages one through five. Honestly, he doesn’t remember his seventh or eighth birthday that well either, despite his -- according to a couple of doctors, anyway -- _amazing,_ photographic memory. Hunk at age six didn’t like the word _photographic,_ didn’t like doctors telling him about it like it was something to be very proud of _._ It didn’t seem to him like he’d _earned_ pride, not when that was just how his brain worked, not when it was something he couldn’t help doing. So he tended to think of it more as a talent for memorization, which was closer to the truth anyway. Thinking back to his childhood won’t give him a picture in his head of a messy bedroom or a smiling face. In that respect, his memory is similar to anyone else’s. But when it comes to books -- cookbooks or textbooks or sci-fi novels -- Hunk’s your man. He thinks it’s something to do with the steps, especially in cookbooks. He’ll remember one thing (two cups of flour) and then the next (one cup of white sugar) until the entire thing unfolds in his head.

It’s handy, sure, but he doesn’t think about it too much. It’s just how his head likes to work. Who is Hunk to deny his head?

(Something else his head is good at is going on tangents.)

(Anyway.)

His sixth birthday was his first time having a birthday in school, which is probably why he remembers it so well -- his brain likes touchstones, things it can focus on before filling in the rest -- and he can picture his teacher grinning at him and ruffling his hair, the cupcakes getting passed around the classroom, the other kids singing to him, his friend Melissa hugging him so hard his spine popped.

The cupcakes had been chocolate and peanut butter. Kind of dry, but good, and sweet, and Hunk had been the center of attention for five minutes while everyone sang, and it had been a little awkward but very cool.

He remembered stopping by the doorway that afternoon, and just looking back at it. Hunk had thought from the first time he’d stepped into his school that classrooms were warm and inviting, and they always had blocks in the corner to build towers with, and some of them had hamsters that would nibble your fingers and crawl all over your stomach. And now this classroom wasn’t just a nice place but the location of a happy moment, for him, of peanut butter cupcakes and bone-cracking hugs.

He smiled at his teacher, who smiled back. “Happy birthday, buddy.”

“I’m six,” Hunk said, wonderingly. Six seemed like an enormously grown-up age. He was six, and he was in first grade, and he was best in his class at math and spelling and everything seemed amazing, even the prospect of going home to a quiet house with his foster siblings, even if both were older than him and liked to stay in their rooms. It was okay. They would be out for dinner, and there might be more cupcakes, but even if there weren’t he didn’t really care, because he was six.

Hunk had dashed out the door to the bus, where he’d sat down next to Melissa and she’d convinced him to play clapping games on the way home, so he’d laughed and sang _coca cola went to town diet pepsi knocked him down_ and she’d messed up the words and he messed up the movements and they both fell over each other laughing, and she invited him to her house so they could play. And Hunk ran up to his front door and asked his foster sister and she said yes, and then they ran down the street, laughing in their scarves and coats, to build a snowman in Melissa’s front yard.

Melissa’s mother made them hot chocolate and kissed her head and Hunk had smiled and smiled, and he’d gone home and had dinner, and he’d fallen asleep thinking _this was the best birthday ever._

Now, slightly more grown up, he thinks: maybe not _ever._ But pretty close.

 

_2._

He met his parents in March.

He was old enough to understand all of it as it was happening, and to be honest he had been old enough for a while, by then, to connect the dots in his head from _Hunk_ to _foster kid_ to _that means I don’t have birth parents_ to _there is a possibility that someday I will get parents from somewhere else._

He didn’t exactly _count_ his various sets of foster parents as variables in that particular sequence of events. They had the name, and all, but they could opt out if fostering got too expensive or too time consuming and parents didn’t . . . do that. They couldn’t opt out.

(Well, apparently Hunk’s birth parents had opted out, but then again, he didn’t count them as real parents either.)

So. He’d moved houses in the middle of March, which was a weird time to do it, he thought, but he didn’t have to change schools, so everyone else seemed to think it was okay. He was confused, though, and kind of sad, but then he’d walked into the house of Aubrey and Kiana Garrett, and he’d wrapped his arms around his middle because there was something about this house that felt more like _home_ than anywhere he’d ever been.

The walls in the living room were painted a gentle, butter-yellow, and half the cabinets in the kitchen only had blue-striped curtains instead of doors, and there was an record player perched on top of a high shelf, and his new foster mom was _tall._ Out the back window, he could see equally tall, creeping vines. Down the hall, he could see a room filled with only wallpaper and bookshelves and a single, overstuffed armchair. He looked back at the woman standing in front of him.

“Hi, honey,” she said, no-nonsense, all warmth. “I’m Aubrey. You can call me that or something else, whatever you want to call me, okay?”

He’d nodded, watching as she picked up his duffel bag and swung it over her shoulder. She was tall and strong and she had a wide, gentle smile. He let her take his hand. (He let himself try out the word _mom._ )

Another woman walked out from the kitchen, wiping her hands. “Hi!” she said. “I’m Kiana, it’s so nice to meet you! You hungry? I bet you’ve been driving a while, huh? You like to cook, or you like to watch?”

No one had ever asked him that before, like he was an adult person and not a small child. He liked her immensely.

“I’ve never cooked before,” he said. She gasped theatrically.

“Well, that’s a shame!” she said. “But I can teach you. I’ve got everything chopped up already, we just have to put it all together!”

He thought about the sound of that, like adding up all the numbers in a tall stack, like adding words together to make sentences. He grinned and nodded at her.

Aubrey carried his bag to his room, and then sat at the kitchen table and watched them cook, grinning softly all the while.

Sometimes, now, Hunk wonders if other adopted kids felt like _that_ when they first met the people who were going to be their families. If they _knew,_ not in words, but in something pressing on their lungs and heart, something big and unfamiliar and peaceful.

Either way -- he came to their house in March, and by September they sat him down on the couch and asked if he’d like to keep them.

(He said yes. Obviously.)

But adoptions took time, and so even while he was waking up every morning and calling them Mom and Mama and helping Mom in her garden and sitting on Mama’s lap while they watched cartoons and devouring books in the back of the library (that was _only two blocks from his new house,_ Hunk had _officially_ the _best life ever_ ) he was still, in the eyes of the state, still a foster kid, not an adopted member of Audrey and Kiana’s family.

(The family also included a spotted, fat cat named Juno, who liked to sleep curled against Hunk’s stomach. Yeah. _Best life ever._ )

So that’s why he remembers his ninth birthday so well, probably. Because it was that day -- January thirteenth -- when they got the papers all signed and sealed so that he was, _officially,_ Hunk Garrett, and he was their son, and they were his moms.

They took him to get cheesecake on the way home and his mama said “This is Hunk, my son, and it’s his birthday today!” he cried into his plate, so happy he couldn’t breathe, because it finally -- it _hit_ him, then, in the middle of that restaurant, that this wasn’t going to be a life he would have to give up in a year or a couple of months, that it was going to be _his,_ forever.

Hunk is fiercely glad for his talent for memorization, when he thinks about this day. If he ever forgot it, even a second, he almost thinks he wouldn’t forgive himself.

 

_3._

Hunk is eleven, and it’s a Saturday, and he spends most of the morning sitting at the kitchen table with Remi on his lap, a coloring book open in front of them, watching as Remi eagerly colors grass purple and trees red, the sky in three different kinds of green and one kind of yellow. She’s short enough (or maybe he’s tall enough) that he can rest his chin on her head and offer suggestions. She’s also old and independent enough that she ignores every single one of said suggestions.

When she says “No!” for the fourth time, he stops suggesting and just sits, watching her draw and talking to her about other things. Occasionally, generously, she will hand him a crayon and instruct him to color something in.

Mama finds them on her way inside from the garden, stopping at the sink to wash her hands and laughing at the way Remi squeals at Hunk for coloring outside the lines.

“Be nice, baby!” she says, and scoops Remi off his lap, settling her on her hip. “It’s his birthday today.”

“Whazzat?” Remi asks, and Hunk snickers. She’s somehow still in the _what’s that?_ phase of being a toddler, but she’s always so eager when she asks the question that it just blurs together into one messy word.

“What’s that,” he corrects. “It’s the day I was born. I’m eleven today!”

“Leven,” Remi says, considers it, and grins. “Cool.”

“Very cool,” Hunk tells her. “Like your birthday. Right?”

She scrunches her eyebrows together and he watches as she thinks through it, tries to make the connection between two things that are the same, but belong to different people. Remi is by no means some kind of genius kid, emotionally or mentally or physically. But he’s glad about that, he thinks, glad that she’ll be able to figure out all this at her own pace and in her own ways and he’s going to be here to help her. If _he’s_ smart -- whatever that means -- he can help her with it.

“Right,” she agrees, finally. “Hunk.”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Juice,” she says decisively.

He snickers again. She’d already been speaking a little when they adopted her, but it was only little things, like _mama_ and _whazzat?_ and _juice._ He doesn’t need to get up, though; Mama already has Remi’s cup in her hands, filled with apple juice. She hands Hunk a cup of orange juice, too.

“So,” Mama says, sitting down at the table with them, passing Remi back to Hunk when he makes a pleading face at her. “What do you want to do for your birthday, baby?”

“Can we go to the science museum?” Hunk asks. Remi, disappointed that no one is paying attention to her, leans back hard against Hunk’s chest. “Oof.”

“ _Oh-_ kay,” Mama says. “You come here, missy. No being mean to Hunk.”

“ _No,_ ” Remi says, smacking the table with her crayon. Hunk sighs.

“It’s okay,” he says, and bounces her once or twice. “She can stay. Just _don’t_ do it again.” He tickles her sides for emphasis, and she squeals.

“You sure you just want to go to the museum?” Mama asks. “You don’t want to invite your friends over or anything?”

“We had a party in school, kind of,” Hunk says. “But the science museum has this really cool machine that can tell you how many liters of blood are in your body and it also has this whole _hallway_ of cool other machines that use physics and stuff to keep moving and if we go today it’s free for kids under twelve and we can probably find a tour guide and they can tell me about all the machines and --”

“Wow,” Mom says, emerging from the office and kissing Mama on the top of her head. “Someone’s really been thinking this through.”

“Yeah!” Hunk says. “And then we can come home and make cake and eat cake for dinner --”

Remi, seeming to sense his excitement, or maybe just recognizing some words, yells “ _Cake!”_ Hunk laughs.

“Yeah, buddy,” he says. “We’re gonna have cake for dinner.”

He attempts to get her to chant _cake for dinner_ with him, but she loses interest after a few chants and goes back to her coloring book. He sighs.

“You’re no fun,” he tells her, jokingly, then looks back up at their parents. “So can we go to the museum?”

Mama grins. “Of course, baby! I can’t wait to see those machines that measure your blood. That sounds _amazing._ ”

Mom leans over and picks up Remi from Hunk’s lap. “We’ve got to feed both of you first,” she says, narrowing her eyes at Mama playfully, “and _then_ we can go.” To Remi, she says, “Hungry, Rem? Ready for lunch?”

Remi squeals and claps her hands. “Mac cheese.”

She’s dropped the _and_ from the middle, but then again, she’s always done that. Hunk grins. “I want mac cheese too.”

Mama flicks his nose from across the table, and he laughs.

When they first told him they were thinking about adopting another child, he thinks they might have been worried about it; worried that he wouldn’t like whoever the new kid was or would feel replaced or abandoned or something. Maybe other kids felt like that. But after being without parents for so long Hunk had just wanted his family to become so big it nearly drowned him, so big he could lose himself within it. The thought of a little sister just made him fall over his feet in an attempt to hug both his parents at once.

The minute Remi walked into their house he loved her. She was tiny and wobbly on her feet and she talked a lot about nonsense using words that weren’t really words, but he loved her. He could sit with her for ages, playing with blocks, hiding his face behind his hands and revealing it again.

It’s not like it was all good, either, like every single day was some kind of rose-colored perfect day, because it wasn’t. Remi could scream when she didn’t get her way and he could get frustrated when he didn’t get his, and sometimes Mom and Mama would pay her too much attention and him too little, or the other way around. But they were his family. Families were like that.

(Hunk really liked _Lilo and Stitch,_ which might have prompted a few of these realizations.)

Even when things were bad, or confusing, or frustrating, he couldn’t be too mad about it. After all, having a family was _way_ better than not having one. That was just a no-brainer, right?

Remi is shouting “Mac cheese, mac cheese, mac cheese,” in the kitchen, and Mom is laughing and filling a pot with water to start it. Mama is putting away the crayons and the coloring book, ruffling his hair as she walks by.

Hunk sips his orange juice and grins. Is every birthday he has gonna be better than the last one? He hopes so. He really, really hopes so.

 

_4._

All of them, including Juno and minus Remi, are standing in the living room, and Mama’s foot is tapping impatiently and at increasingly higher speeds.

“Re _mi,”_ Hunk calls up the stairs. “C’mon. I want to _go._ ”

“I gotta find my jacket,” she yells back. “Ask Mama where it is.”

“Mama, do you know --”

“Do you _think_ I know where that girl left her jacket? Her room looks like something exploded in it,” Mama gripes. “We’re going to be late to our reservation.”

Not for the first time, Hunk questions taking an eight year old to what is generally considered a _nice restaurant,_ but it’s his birthday and she agreed to go and he went to the _fair_ and on _roller coasters_ with _her_ last summer, so.

(Yes, they were kiddie coasters, because she was only eight. Yes, they didn’t go too high. Yes, Hunk was terrified anyway -- those things are _rickety_. Yes, she laughed at him. Whatever.)

“Remi, come on,” he yells up the stairs again. “We’re gonna be late.”

“The reservation's at seven!”

“ _Late,_ ” he says, checking his watch. It’s six-thirty; the restaurant is twenty minutes away.

“Baby, we’ll make it,” Mom says, calm, leaning against the door in stark contrast to Mama’s anxiety and Hunk’s frustration.

“I’m gonna go get her,” he says, making a split second decision, and kicking off his shoes before running back upstairs.

“Tell her if she cleaned her room more often she wouldn’t be having this problem!” Mama says, but she says it loud enough that Remi can probably hear her anyway.

Hunk snickers to himself, because Hunk is the type of person who, to the delight of his parents and the annoyance of Remi, keeps his room very neat.

He doesn’t knock before he goes into Remi’s room, just tosses himself onto her bed and laughs when it rattles, waiting for her to squeal _Hunk!_ and shove him and continue looking for her shoes.

He isn’t expecting to find her frozen, holding a piece of paper in her hands, staring at him bug-eyed and shaky.

“Whatcha got there, buddy?” Hunk says. He’s wearing a nice shirt and slacks, his favorite shiny shoes. He feels very, very grown up in the green and pink hues of her bedroom.

She winces and hides the piece of paper behind her back. “Nothing,” she says, in the most guilty voice Hunk has ever heard. “Just -- stuff.”

“Stuff that’s so important you’re gonna make us late for my birthday dinner?”

“I was _coming,_ ” she says. “I just needed my shoe --”

“This shoe?” Hunk says, picking up one of _her_ nice shoes, the one that’s not currently on her foot, and letting it dangle off his finger.

She blushes and snatches it. “I just --”

“Remi,” Hunk says, and uses his best Smart Big Brother voice. “What’s up?”

She sighs hard enough that all the air seems to leak out of her.

“You can tell me,” Hunk says, seriously. Because she’s his little sister, and he would probably lasso in the moon for her, even if she can be an absolute brat sometimes. Like now, when she’s making them late and won’t tell him what’s going on.

She sighs again, and silently withdraws the piece of paper from behind her back, and hands it to him. He looks at the first line.

 _Dear Mr. Garrett,_ it says, _your application for a merit-based scholarship to the Garrison Institute has been received and is being evaluated --_

“Remi, what the f -- _heck._ Why would you take this and try to hide it?”

“Don’t get mad!” she says.

Hunk sighs. “I’m not mad,” he tells her, even though he is absolutely mad, and _absolutely_ absolutely going to have a long talk with Mom and Mama about boundaries and _not opening people’s mail._

She scuffs her foot against the ground and then sits down, next to him, on her bed.

“Look,” she says, sighing through her nose, “it’s just . . . if you get in, you’re gonna _leave._ ”

It kind of clicks in Hunk’s mind, then. “Oh.”

She scowls. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you! Cause you’d go _oh_ and then you’d start trying to figure out the nice way to say _no_ to them even though this is, like, your _dream_ because I said I’d miss you and then I wouldn’t have to miss you anymore but I’d feel bad because you wanted to go so bad and you worked so hard on your application and --”

“Remi,” Hunk says. “Chill, okay?”

She shuts her mouth, but continues to glare at him. He has to smile then, fondly. She’s such a brat.

“I don’t have to go,” he says. “I can wait til I’m eighteen.”

She’s right, is the thing. He’s already planning a polite refusal, some way to say _can this wait._ Some way to say _I don’t want to leave my family quite yet._

“But you _want_ to go,” she says, crossing her arms. And he stops, and looks at her, _really_ looks at her.

She’s eight, yeah. She’s eight and she’s running headfirst through third grade and she’s got the same kind of chubby body he always had when he was little, but she’s not _him_ when he was eight. She’s not the kid stumbling his way into a family and hoping they’d keep him. She’s _got_ a family. She’s fine.

He’s not abandoning her by leaving.

It’s a big enough revelation that he has to, mentally, take a step back. It doesn’t make it hurt any less, to think of not being here to cut apples and peanut butter and hear about her first day of fourth grade, to have to be her brother from a distance instead of up close when Hunk has spent almost eight years grabbing on to this family of his with both hands and tying it to him.

But she’s going to be fine, here by herself. She’s going to have Mom and Mama and Juno and all of her friends. And he’s going to have Skype and summer and vacation weekends, and, hopefully, new friends, if he goes.

“Okay,” he says, and means it. “Okay, if they take me, I’ll go.”

It’s clearly what she wanted to hear, but her face crumples all the same.

“I’m gonna miss you,” she says, and buries her face in his shoulder.

“I’ll Skype you every single day,” he promises. “And that’s if I get in, like, they must have a million applicants --”

“No one in the world is as smart as you,” she says, and he’s reminded that she can be really nice when she’s not being angry.

“I dunno,” Hunk says, and hugs her again. “You could give me a run for my money, squirt.”

 

They’re five minutes late to dinner. Hunk doesn’t mind.

(Mama does, though. They both get an earful.)

 

_5._

Hunk’s sitting on the Castle’s common room couch and fighting back tears. There’s no one else in the room, and it’s his eighteenth birthday. He looks out the window, and then instantly wishes he hadn’t; all he can see is the endless, glowing stars, and in the distance, specks of planets. It’s big and empty and beautiful and Hunk doesn’t _want_ to hate it, but today, he can’t help it.

He takes a deep breath and goes back to staring at the ceiling, which is when the others begin to trickle into the room, talking amongst themselves and glancing over at Hunk with varying levels of concern, until Lance walks in, rubbing at his eyes and yawning.

And Hunk is hit all over again with how much he loves him, because the first thing Lance does when he sees Hunk that morning is tumble down on the couch next to him, wrap his arms around Hunk’s shoulders, and firmly refuse to move for the rest of the day.

Hunk’s grateful for it, and doubly grateful that Lance refuses to talk when the other Paladins ask what’s going on. Lance just sits, and runs his fingers through Hunk’s hair, and waits it out; through all of Hunk’s careful breaths and quiet tears, he is there, sitting and waiting.

“This isn’t how I thought this birthday would go,” Hunk says finally. Lance _hmms_ in agreement. Lance’s birthday, last summer, had been about the same. Sober, and too quiet, neither of them telling anyone what day it was, disappearing into Lance’s room to talk, for Lance to exhaust his voice about _home_ , his mother’s food and his father’s hugs, his uncles poking at his sides and his aunts telling him he was too skinny, his older siblings kissing or punching him hello, turning sixteen in a crowd of adults and little kids, in between all of them, just where he liked to be. Hunk listened, and kissed his forehead, and then baked him dessert, which they hid in a box under Hunk’s bed and ate over the course of a week.

“Yeah,” Lance says. “I thought we’d be home by now, too,” and Hunk almost cries again at Lance’s ability to _understand,_ even when Hunk is having emotions he doesn’t even really get himself.

Without thinking, Hunk glances across the room at Keith and Pidge and Allura, who are all talking amongst themselves, too quiet for either him or Lance to hear. Lance’s thumb traces circles on his shoulder.

“My sister would be ten this year,” he says, quietly, and Lance looks troubled.

“Yeah,” he says. “Remi.”

He’d never met her in person, back on Earth, but Hunk had Skyped with her once a day like clockwork, drunk in her stories of elementary school and helped her with her math. And Lance, his roommate, had known her too, had gotten used to cracking jokes at her in the half hour that Hunk’s moms would let her use the computer.

“She’s gonna start middle school,” Hunk says, leaning his head against Lance’s. “She’s -- I mean, she’ll be fine, she’s so smart, but --”

“Yeah,” Lance says, “yeah.”

His thumb keeps moving, and Hunk closes his eyes.

“Did I ever tell you about when she was five and she wouldn’t eat dinner unless I was the one who made it?”

“Yeah,” Lance says, and shifts a little, so they’re comfortable. “But it’s a good story, dude. Tell me again.”

“It started out as just mac and cheese,” Hunk says, and opens his eyes, and talks himself hoarse.

-

Later, they seal themselves away in the kitchen and Lance helps him make chocolate cupcakes.

Lance does a lot of eating frosting, and not a lot of baking, but it’s nice just to have him there, sitting and laughing at Hunk’s jokes, his eyes fond, and kissing him with a mouth tasting of chocolate, and even if it’s not a birthday with his moms and his sister, even if that’s eating him up inside, it’s good to have a birthday with Lance.

Later, Hunk insists on sharing the cupcakes with the others at dinner.

Allura says, “Is there some special occasion we’ve forgotten about?” and her smile is gentle.

Hunk shakes his head. “I just wanted to do something nice,” he explains, and pretends not to notice when they all know he’s lying, when their faces get hard or sad. They, in turn, quickly pretend to have not noticed the lie in the first place.

After dinner, Pidge finds him, and punches him in the arm. “It’s your birthday and you didn’t even _tell us?_ ”

Hunk doesn’t ask how she knew. He rubs the spot where she hit him and says nothing.

“Hunk,” she says, and he sees Remi in the sad line of her mouth, in her slumping shoulders. He almost wants to cry. Is this what she looked like when she found out he --

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just --”

Words fall apart in his mouth, and Pidge watches him struggle for a moment, her face pinched and worried.

“Did you know I have a little sister?” he asks her, finally. “She’s gotta be almost ten by now.”

“Wow, she’s way younger than you,” Pidge says, matter of fact, and still a little angry; so unlike Lance’s quiet, gentle support. “Why did your parents wait so long between kids?”

“They didn’t,” Hunk says. “They adopted her when I was ten, but they adopted me when I was nine, so it was really just a year.”

“Oh,” Pidge says, and scuffs her foot on the ground. “Do you miss them?” This last question escapes her mouth like it isn’t meant to, because Pidge hates talking about feelings, hates even admitting she has them. Hunk thinks of her dad and her brother, lost in the endless sky outside the ship’s windows.

A laugh, almost hysterical, bubbles up in his stomach. “Dude, of course I do. Every single day.”

“Yeah,” Pidge says. “You’re eighteen today, then?”

He nods, almost relieved she changed the subject.

“Huh,” she says, “huh. It’s weird.”

“Weird how?”

She frowns. “Just weird,” she says, scuffing her foot against the floor again. “You’re, like, a grown-up.”

He shrugs. “It’s weird for me too.”

“Happy birthday,” she tells him, then. “Sorry I punched you. I guess I get it, not wanting to tell people.”

He grabs her by the arm to stop her before she goes. “How much older than you is he? Matt?”

She squints at him. “Um, I don’t know. Like, six years? Or seven? Yeah, I think it’s seven. Seriously, you guys don’t have that weird of an age difference. Matt’s and mine is close enough, so.”

“No, I mean,” and he wraps his arms around himself. “Were you mad at him? When he left? To go to space?”

“Hunk, of course I was mad,” Pidge says, and pushes her glasses up her nose. It’s honest and logical and it kind of makes him want to cry, but that’s Pidge for you. “I wanted to freaking kill him.”

“Oh,” he mumbles, and closes his eyes.

He opens them again when he feels her hand on his arm. “I was also twelve,” she says. “And I didn’t have any friends. He was it, okay? So of course I was mad.” She squeezes his arm. “She’s not gonna be mad. She’s gonna be --” She looks away, then, slightly red-eyed. “She’s gonna be glad to have you back, that’s all. Because she thought you were --”

Even Pidge, always so blunt, cannot say _dead._

But it’s reassurance enough.

“Thanks,” Hunk says quietly.

 

Even with reassurance, his room is too quiet that night, so he sneaks into Lance’s instead, which is, according to both Allura and Coran, Not Allowed, but they end up doing more often than not anyway, because it’s easier for Hunk to sleep when he’s being held and easier to wake up and face this endless space and the enormity of the mission when he’s already looking at Lance’s bedhead and the way his sweats hang on his hips, easier to get up and go save the world when Lance grins all sleepy and kisses the corner of his mouth and tosses him his bandana.

“Hey,” Lance says, echoing in the quiet of the room. “Hunk.”

“Yeah?”

“Happy birthday.” He feels Lance’s mouth on the back of his head, near his ear. He probably got a mouthful of hair, but doesn’t seem to mind. “Next year it’ll be even better.”

Hunk takes a deep, slightly shaky breath, and closes his eyes.

  


_6._

Hunk is nineteen, and he can’t breathe.

He’s here, on his own street, his own childhood home. The snow hides Mama’s garden, but there’s a snowman in the front yard wearing one of Mom’s workout tanks. There’s a yellow bike tossed on the driveway, big enough for an eleven-year old. Big enough for Remi.

She always liked yellow.

Lance takes his hand. “Talk to me, dude,” he says. Pidge shoots them both a weird look.

(Easy for her to be calm right now. Her dad and brother are back on the ship.)

He doesn’t know what to say.

“It’s my birthday,” he says, instead of _what if they don’t want me back? What if they’re happier alone? What if they took a chance on a foster kid and it didn’t work out and they shrugged and went on with their lives?_

He’s distantly aware that that’s not the most logical line of thought, that Lance was worried about the exact same thing and his family hadn’t let go of him for hours, but, well. Hunk’s brain is _also_ good at overthinking.

Lance starts to laugh. “Your birthday, holy shit,” he says. “It totally is.”

Suddenly, through his nervousness, Hunk can see the wonder in it all, the beauty. Lance is laughing and holding his hand, and Pidge is grinning at them, and Keith is standing there shivering in the cold but powering through it, because this is Hunk’s house, and Hunk’s family, and he’s coming home for his birthday.

He lets Lance’s fingers slip through his and walks up to the door, through a path that’s been messily shoveled in the snow. He takes a deep breath.

He’s nineteen and battle-worn and in love. It’s his birthday. And he’s home.

A smile sneaks over his face. He’s _home._

He raises his hand and knocks on the door.

His mom opens it, distracted, calling out to someone over her shoulder before turning to look outside. She has a book tucked under her arm, and she’s wearing one of her moss-green turtleneck sweaters that she only digs out of the closet in the dead of winter. Her hair is tucked into a high and tight bun, like always; her glasses balanced on the rim of her nose because she needs bifocals but won’t admit it.

She looks at him, and she drops the book.

He knows he’s crying, but he does his best to choke some words out anyway.

“Hi, Mom,” he says. “Sorry I couldn’t make it in time for Christmas.”

Her arms are around him before he can say another word. He can feel all the muscle in her as he hugs her back, remembers riding on her shoulders as a child, even though he was eight -- and too old, really, for that -- by the time he got there. He remembers doing push-ups in the living room with her when he was twelve, collapsing after five and watching her go on, ten, twenty, fifty. He remembers how safe he always felt in her arms.

“Hunk,” she sobs into his shoulder. They’re the same height now, enough so that he can grip onto her turtleneck and cry. “My baby. You’re _alive_.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says, and she shushes him, like it was all a bad dream. “I’m sorry.”

“Audrey, what’s --”

He looks over his mom’s shoulder to see his mama, and promptly starts to cry harder. She rushes at them, and he lets go of his mom a moment to swoop her into his arms, hold her as close as he can --

“Remi,” his mom cries, pushing past them, back into the house. “Remi, baby, come downstairs.”

Hunk looks up to the top of the staircase, sneaks a glance to the pictures of his sister hanging on the walls. When he refocuses on the top, there’s a girl the size of Pidge standing there.

The size of Pidge, but _not_ Pidge; she’s got sharp elbows and black eyes and she’s absolutely, unquestionably Remi. He remembers the look on Pidge’s face when she hugged Matt for the first time in years, how Lance cried when his mom kissed his forehead. He wonders why none of them told him you don’t even really feel happy. You just feel _whole,_ peaceful, like something’s been carved out of you and returned in one piece.

He’s Hunk Garrett. He’s nineteen today. He’s standing in the same room as his parents and sister for the first time in years, and he’s _himself_ again. He hasn’t been himself for so long. There’s been so much of him missing.

He watches Remi work it out, watches the tears start to congregate on her face. She takes a tentative step closer. He holds out his arms.

“Hi, buddy,” he says. “Sorry I took so long.”

She practically launches herself at him, running from the top of the stairs, and he yells and catches her and she alternates between crying and laughing and pounding him on the shoulders with her fists.

It’s, no question, Hunk’s best birthday ever.

  


**Author's Note:**

> me: [holding a gun to the voltron writer's heads] give hunk a backstory, you cowards  
> them: [continue to not do that]  
> me: [shooting the gun into the ceiling] do i have to do EVERYTHING myself!
> 
> anyway i know some of this was jossed by season four, ect but i couldnt be assed to change it so. hope you enjoyed i'm @astrolesbian on twitter and my hardly-used vld account is @futchpidge


End file.
